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- Hacker News
- Let’s see them ship some chip firstby cluckindan
- The price is similar, as they all rely on same upstream suppliers. The quality is kinda meh.by feverzsj
- > 8% to 9% of the worldwide DRAM market share in 2025
how much more do they need to ship to satisfy you?
by blitzar - is it retail or hype driven - that's the questionby levanlevi
- It's driven by the supreme leader's grand plan, like everything else there.by feverzsj
- The more interesting question is: why does the rest of the world not increase their production prowess? I am aware of most of the reasons, but I am getting tired of the "China is better than the rest of the world". It is more that China did a lot of things that the others either failed to do or no longer wanted to do. Case in point is Germany: from "our cars are best" to "hey, chinese cars are now better" (or, cheaper, for a comparative quality). This constant complaining is so strange. Would that energy not be better spent to try to become better?by shevy-java
- Mostly self-inflicted wounds in form of climate pledges, climate taxes and such. Because of the goal to achieve zero emissions goal and climate neutrality, we abandoned cheap energy sources such as coal and pushed our heavy industries out of Europe to China. We still need those products, so we import them from China while wondering why European industrial segment isn't growing. Even in the clean energy sector, most solar panels come from China.
- It takes 2 years in EU to get approval to build a shed. Imagine how long it takes to get approvals for a chip factory which uses a lot of water and very toxic chemicals.
UK has been trying to get approvals for a new runway at Heathrow airport for over 20 years !!! now.
by dist-epoch - The rest of the world is chasing models of investment in procurement of goods and services that get stuck on neoliberal capitalist antipatterns where every action demands a short-term profit motive. These are now very large-scale, highly-complex-supplychain manufacturing projects, and you cannot remain competitive if you are just Putting Faith In The Market to solve your problems. There's too much planning and sustained, structured goal-orientation required for investors or for the sort of contract-bid, public-private actions Western politicals are used to engaging with.by mapt
- It is because in the west we suffer from self inflicted obstacles that make it impossible to get out of our own way. The Chinese gov must think they are playing on easy mode.by mosura
- Because the capitalist west doesn't have strategic view, beside maybe on the defense sector. Everything else must produce profits next quarter not in the next 3 years.by raizer88
- The short answer is VW doesn't have the ability to compete with China's best EV car company on EV price, factory automation, or raw input (labor, electricity, metals) economies of scale. The complaining is to get politicians / regulators to prevent the Chinese EVs from being imported into their domestic markets.
Chinese structural advantages: monetary policy, lower cost of living, better infrastructure (electrical and transportation are all new within the last 20 years), lower cost of {concrete, factory machinery, metals, electrical} due to economies of scale.
Chinese EV manufacturers advantages: they don't sell ICE cars, so they don't have any legacy customers, factories to retool, or brand migration issues. And they mostly stole their technology from hiring Tesla factory workers to moonlight for them and share the design, technology, tooling, and RE the Tesla finished product.
Major Western legacy car company disadvantages: Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, etc... all have significant reasons why they can't or won't make the super risky attempt to go all-EV. They all have $10s of billions in debt they are still paying off for their current capital improvements. Those debts assume they contribute selling ICE because EVs last longer so they would sell fewer units per year. It's simply less risk to avoid making any EVs and pay politicians to protect their businesses than to try to compete with 10 year old Chinese phone-companies-turned-EV companies. On top of that, the worldwide demand for EVs is only about the volume of the single most popular model of Toyota. They would have to go into massive debt on a giant risk that consumers will want more EVs (and that the EVs they design/build will sell better than the current ICE cars they have meticulously crafted for 50-100 years).
by thephyber - > Would that energy not be better spent to try to become better?
The problem is, shareholders have bled Western companies dry in the chase for returns on investments. There is no money left in the companies to retool them to be competitive with China.
Meanwhile, the CCP just pours dollars into their companies.
Unfortunately, there is no punishment in Western societies if you run a company into the ground as long as you pay your debts on the way out.
by mschuster91 - 50 years ago you could ask the same question about Europe, the USA and Japan: why are they so much more productive than everyone else?
So others did spend energy on becoming better and now you see a different picture when you look at the world.
by brabel - If the golden stick of memory sitting on Trumps desk has its intended effect - and the US allow Apple to buy memory from CXMT then another 500% surge might happen.by blitzar
- Trump owns micron stock.
No way he's letting Chinese chips in.
by polski-g - The reverse might be worse for the US in the long run.
Right now, the US leads China in compute-heavy R&D because the US has access to more compute, and that compute has two components that China has limited ability to produce domestically: the GPUs themselves and the DRAM. A decent fraction of the balance of the plant is already produced in China.
If the US refuses to buy Chinese tech, then we may find ourselves paying more for compute than Chinese labs (DRAM first, but Huawei really really wants to catch up with the combined forces of TSMC, Nvidia and AMD) and falling behind on access to compute at acceptable prices.
If I were setting US policy, I would be trying to get the US-friendly companies to increase production and trying to encourage domestic production so that the US-friendly world can stay ahead. Getting held back by a DRAM cartel that wants to juice profits at the expense of output is not good for the US.
by amluto - I wouldn’t take much stock in the SSE (Shanghai stock exchange) just yet. It’s still a very much insider traded market, and if you aren’t a whale or very good at following whales, you aren’t going to do very good.by seanmcdirmid
- > Once an affordable component used to build devices, memory prices have more than doubled in recent months - and are still rising.
Is this accurate? It looks like they are no longer rising, at least for DDR5 memory:
https://de.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
Most of the price increase did occur in Q4 2025 and most prices are fairly stable since then. Maybe this is different for LPDDR, GDDR, or HBM, but I would like to see evidence for that.
by cubefox - Look at DDR5-6000, it clearly is rising again since June.by Tepix
- I have nothing to say about this company's long term potential, but I'm curious to know whether this will become an enormous "tik stok" like SK Hynix became in South Korea. I've watched a short documentary about the investment mania in SK and it's really scary.by glimshe
- > the investment mania in SK and it's really scary.
i mean, it shouldn't be scary, because their failure is their own, and i doubt there would be collateral damage outside of those high risk investors.
It's scary for _them_, but it's an interesting case study for an outsider.
by chii - South Korea has opened its financial doors to the outside world, and since SK Hynix is a publicly traded company, that's allowed capital to flow in and take control of the company.by addozhang
- The DRAM market is a notorious pork cyclic business. SK Hynix and Micron have stood on the brink several times.
No matter what happens the Chinese will carve out a niche since they're playing the long game. And DRAM will always be needed.
by hn_submit - Tesla is kind the same. Everybody bought it, because it went up so much, less because of the product. I guess every AI would do the same.by _trampeltier
- If the chinese government feels its critical to china's success then it will be backed like alibaba and wechat and others wereby samrus
- You would think that the DRAM shortage would propel Europe to invest in DRAM fabs. But no, they think it's too risky because prices may fall in the next few years and building fabs costs a lot of money and is hard. They'd rather sell other people's stuff than make it themselves.
Ergo, the Chinese will take this sector too without so much of a whimper from Europe.
In a couple of years the Chinese will own 25% of the DRAM market and make bumper profits akin to Big Tech. Europe's response will be to levy import tariffs to at least siphon off some money from it.
by hn_submit - EU will regulate itself out of everything, sit, cry and complaign about devastated economy.
Noone votes for these ppl and stupid decisions they make destroy everyones lifes.
by pojzon - It's not possible. High living costs, high energy costs (100x of China) and high regulatory costs all mean that if you were to build a modern fab, you'd need to sell your product for way more than the price offered by the competition in Asia and the USA, just to break even.
The interstate competition you see in the USA, where states compete against each other for companies to invest, is plain illegal in the EU.
Tax breaks? Illegal. Subsidized energy? Illegal. Subsidized land? Illegal. Permit exemptions? Illegal.
EU countries are not allowed to compete against each other by offering targeted state aid as incentive. This is to prevent wealthier EU nations from outcompeting poorer EU nations when it comes investments.
Basically the EU, in our infinite wisdom, are forever doomed to be disadvantaged.
by mortarion - EU chip industry: best I can do is eat glue in the corner.by jonkoops